TERRA FIRMA ARRIVES! TALK ABOUT A SCI-FI ADVENTURE (AND NOT JUST FOR THE NOVEL BUT FOR THE AUTHOR WHO WROTE IT!)

 

Terra Firma! Finally! I know, I know. They say "genius matures late," at least that is what Shelby Foote said when talking about Abraham Lincoln. I hope it carries over into dreamers like me. God willing, right? God is the God of late bloomers and losers and scrape-graces and those under slight regard and so I feel I am in good hands seeing as how those are some of my finer labels. To publish a book at this stage of life and not some memoir either but a full out pedal-to-the-metal Sci-fi work with aliens and monsters and goblins and furious gunplay--I mean! What was I thinking, right? Alas, there is no help for it and I'm not about to complain to the Father in heaven and ask "Why has Thou made me thus?" I gotta tell you I'm happy in this very skin I'm in, wrinkled though it may be.

SO SOME LOVES: Buckeyes, Bruins, the Cavs, the B1G, Jorge Luis Borges, Antony Beevor,  Rachmaninoff, Anna Applebaum, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jay Z, Shelby Foote, George Orwell, Astropilot, Sync 24, Adriatique (Especially Tullum set), Ex Machina (what a movie and soundtrack!), The Searchers (greatest movie every made!), Lennon and McCarthy, Smokey Robinson, Hal David, early Earth, Wind and Fire, the fabulous Zhu Xiao-Mei playing the greatest composer who ever lived (JS Bach, of course, but you already knew), Roberta Flack's Chapter Two,  Louis Armstrong, the Five Stevie Wonder masterpieces beginning with Music of My Mind, Booker Little, Donald Byrd (A New Perspective is one of the most underrated albums ever!), A Tribe Called Quest (right?), early Kanye West, Shirley Bassey, Ella Fitzgerald (Is it me or are her songbooks the greatest expositions of the Great American Songbook ever?), Patrick O'Brian sea novels, Anthony Thiselton's glorious Systematic Theology, those hidden, utterly fabulous pro-Union films The Romance of Rosy Ridge and The Tall Target (The South, as we all know, won The Civil War in the cinematic space), the first cycle CSO Beethoven Nine Symphonies under Solti (How great is that percussion? It was recorded when the CSO was hungry and moving to take on Karajan and Szell and to conquer! Some Biographies: Chernow's Titan, Montefiore's Court of the Red Tsar, Manchester's American Ceasar, Goldsworhty's Augustus, Frank's Dostoevsky. How great, by the way, is the late Christopher Logue's War Music? Talk about singing Homer with fire and flair! Oh and props to Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo too. In their hands Homer and Virgil rock! Art? Yeah well thinking always about Braque's Bach works, Caravaggio's Matthew tryptic, and the Kerry James Marshall show-stopping exhibition that toured two years ago.

Reading a lot. Listening a lot. Processing a lot. A lot those are the operative words. A lot went into Terra Firma, built up over the years, and it all came blasting (not spewing) out in Sci-fi! I hope you enjoy it. It's crazy, scary (I hope), desperate but, at the end of the day, it's about the love two sisters from another mother have for each other and how they join a rag tag band, lead by an iron hard MI6 matron from Edinburgh, to battle terrifying evil. It's all hands on deck!

But, you already know!

Oh stay tuned for greater reflections than the grab bag I just threw at you. Miles supposedly once asked Trane why he soloed so long. Trane didn't miss a beat: "I got a lot to say." Drop the mic!

Stay tuned.

You can always hit me up at fromandromedaandback@gmail.com